Even as the SDP continues to focus on cost-of-living issues – proposing ways to reduce healthcare costs, coming...

Even as the SDP continues to focus on cost-of-living issues – proposing ways to reduce healthcare costs, coming up with alternative ideas to lower HDB prices, fighting for minimum wage for our workers, and so on – we would be negligent if we did not, at the same, educate the Singaporean public on the gravity of our freedom of assembly. There are many people, even those who want to see political change in Singapore, who continue to think that matters like political freedoms and civil liberties are esoteric concepts, far-removed from their everyday lives. "Human rights cannot make me better off" is the common refrain. They have never been more wrong. It is precisely because we don't have political rights that most of us will have little to retire on even though we are the biggest savers in the world; it is because we have been stripped of our civil liberties that we work one...